How do you deal with "bad" users?
For example, one of our users signed up with a credit card and made the payment for the first month. We had an open grace period, so he never paid for 4 months total. Our team reached out to the customer 3 times, and he acknowledged. In the meantime, he was still using the full system features (premium and all).
Eventually, we said enough is enough, so we downgraded the customer's plan and decided it's okay to lose a bad customer.
Has anything like that happened to you? How do you prevent or deal with it?
I've had users who applied for the top tier where overages are billed to them in the end. I had it setup like that because I wanted to give users flexibility. Unfortunately users from latin america and eastern europe abused the system, would run up huge bills and cancel one day before their accounts get charged. When I tried to reach out over email to discuss with them, or to warn them they were going to get billed, silence.
Unfortunately i've had to remove this unlimited tier, and now I pre-charge for everything.
Thanks for sharing your experience @lucw
Unfortunately, swindlers come in all shapes and sizes and from all countries :/. That's a tough situation you were put in. Which is really kind of a risk because we do billing based payment (pay after you use) but maybe we should bill once a threshold has been reached to minimize the risk.
Believe it or not I even had at some point a system which was basically "unlimited", because it was based on patreon membership, without actual API metered controls. I just asked people to use what they consider fair.
But in general people are much happier with a transparent system, where they are told "you pay this, you get that". Saying "well it's unlimited, but not really" is not really transparent, so i'm staying away from that for now.
I'm going to have to disagree on your statement that this can happen in any country, there are marked cultural differences in how people approach usage of resources that appear "free". However I don't emit a moral judgment, it's just a life experience.
that's good experience @lucw ! Thanks for sharing
It's perfectly fine to fire a bad customer.
Well said. And indeed that's what happened.
Also want to add if the bad customers are are doing chargebacks and that sort of thing, reach out to your payment processor and let them know what the customer is doing before you end up getting your account limited.
Hope this helps!
Good point. Thank you @Sweepsify !
Anytime my friend :) Thanks for sharing!